How did smartness get to be so central in evaluation in a discipline that is supposed to be seeking knowledge and wisdom? And what is it doing t o us as students, teachers, colleagues, and researchers to allow this culture to persist? What are the full costs of this culture, in which we all to some degree participate, even if only passively?

Sarah-Jane Leslie and colleagues (2015) have done research which might tell us something about these costs. Leslie and colleagues polled academics nationwide in disciplines across the university and got evidence that philosophers are at the very high end of the spectrum of disciplines in their answer to the question whether success in their field requires “raw, innate talent” or “a special aptitude that can’t be taught”. Moreover, Leslie and colleagues discovered that, in general, disciplines where such an idea prevails—mathematics, physics, music composition, among others—have lower representations of women and historically under-represented groups than disciplines where greater importance is attached to “effort and dedication” as opposed to “raw ability”. Our ideology of smartness may work against an ideal of inclusiveness. So it’s no longer cute—can we also make it no longer cool?

Railton also makes the point that the kind of divergent thinking that can really aid philosophical creativity is likely to be systematically suppressed by the hegemony of smart.

We’ll never know what this ideology of smartness has cost the discipline over the years in terms of the discouragement of creative minds of all ages who just didn’t, or wouldn’t, fit that mold.

I think this actually ties to Emily's point about hard work.

In my experience I only ever get good at something to the extent that I can overcome my anxieties and embarrassments and be willing to do it badly. When I write a paper or book I have to tell myself that the first draft is going to suck. And sometimes it does. Sometimes the final draft sucks pretty bad or is embarrassing. But (and this applies to everything) if I wasn't willing to work really hard putting out crap, I'd never achieve even basic competence, not to mention maybe achieving real understanding or beauty. The ideology of smart strikes me as a tremendous impediment in this regard.

There are things we can do though. Railton again:

I was speaking with a mathematician the other day—the quintessential field of “smarts”. She has an international reputation and works in a top department. She looked at me in a level gaze. “I always tell my women students that I wasn’t the strongest student in my graduate class. And I wasn’t the second strongest student. But maybe I had better ideas. Or asked better questions. Or cared more about the work.”

Friday, February 20, 2015

One of the central axes in Heidegger scholarship involves the extent to which one can make sense of the following deeply weird passages from Paragraph 44 of Being and Time:

“There is” [“gibt es”] truth only insofar as Da-sein is and as long as it is. Beings are discovered only when Da-sein is, and only as long as Da-sein is are they disclosed. Newton’s laws, the law of contradiction, and any truth whatsoever, are true only as long as Da-sein is. Before there was any Da-sein, there was no truth; nor will there be any after Da-sein is no more. For in such a case truth as disclosedness, discovering, and discoveredness cannot be. Before Newton’s laws were discovered, they were not “true.” From this it does not follow that they were false or even that they would become false if ontically no discoveredness were possible any longer.

This can be read this in a variety of ways, from a nearly trivial stipulation about how we are going to use technical notions of truth or falsity on the one hand to an affirmation of full blown Berkeleyan idealism on the other. Heidegger explicitly tries to distance himself from the idealist extreme. He goes on to write:

The fact that before Newton his laws were neither true nor false cannot mean that the beings which they point out in a discovering way did not previously exist. The laws became true through Newton, thorough them beings in themselves became accessible to Da-sein. With the discoveredness of beings, they show themselves precisely as the beings that they previously were. To discover in this way is the kind of being of “truth.”

But then a few pages later, Heidegger seems to take back precisely this very realist concession.

“There is” [Es gibt] being--not beings--only insofar as truth is. And truth is only because and as long as Da-sein is. Being and truth “are” equiprimordially.

But the three passages together trap Heidegger in an absurdity.* Being is only insofar as truth is. But earlier he has asserted that truth is only insofar as Dasein is. So being is only insofar as Dasein is. But in his rejection of idealism, he has said that beings exist without Dasein. But all of this together would entail the prima facie absurd position that beings exist without being. Some of the best essays in Crowell and Malpas' magnificent Transcendental Heidegger explore these issue, particularly those by Christina LaFont and Herman Phillipse, who uses these and other passages to pose “Heidegger’s problem of the external world.” LaFont and Phillipse separately show that it is very, very difficult to make sense of just exactly what the question of the meaning of Being is supposed to amount to if things can exist without being. Interesting, Phillipse and LaFont's concerns are largely homologous to the concerns raised by Quentin Meillassoux in After Finitude about the entire phenomenological tradition.

Interpreters such as Taylor Carmen or Robert Brandom tend to see the question of the meaning of being as a question of transcendental psychology, that is concerning how minds are able to comprehend that and what things are. As such they have a much easier time dismissing such problem passages. But interpreters such as Graham Harman who take the problem of the meaning of being to have much stronger metaphysical resonance, concerning actuality (that things are) and essence (what they are) (and note that in the Nietzsche lectures Heidegger traces the fall from pre-Socratic wisdom to be precisely the separation of these notions), find Heideggerian philosophy of mind to be a caricature of Heidegger’s essential idea.

As someone who is not a specialist in Heidegder, to me the state of secondary literature seems to be this. Carmen develops a profound Heideggerian philosophy of mind, in part by building on Dreyfus and Okrent’s groundbreaking work, but also in part by ignoring much of what Heidegger has to offer metaphysics. Likewise Harman develops a profound metaphysics by ignoring much of what Heidegger has to offer the philosophy of mind.* Weirdly, French post-structuralist Heideggerians do something in between! That is, current debates about "The Speculative Turn" include debates about whether to read the work of post-structuralists along Carmanian or Harmanian lines. Brad Elliot Stone (here) has utilized P.F. Strawson's work to make the most powerful generalized case for Harmania, a case for which assorted Deleuzians, Simondonians, Whiteheadians, Lacanians, etc. have been paving the way the last decade or so.

In Heidegger's Philosophy of Being Herman Phillipse argues that traditional Heidegger scholarship’s willingness to accept Heidegger’s pretense that there is a univocal problem of being places the scholars in question in a similar epistemic state of those theologians who start interpreting the Bible by taking its (supposed) own assertion of consistency at face value. Since I'm more interested in what we can learn from philosophers Heidegger, I don't feel the need to adjudicate this issue (albeit self-awareness of what one is doing requires registering it).

Rather, what I want to do at least by this Summer is see where Kris McDaniel's metaphysical reading of the Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit distinction as well as his program for phenomenological metaphysics fits into Harman's earlier interpretation of Heidegger as well as happenings in "the new continental metaphysics" (as personified by Harman and Stone's positive programs) more generally. From my brief read-throughs thusfar, I think that reading McDaniel from the perspective of recent events in continental metaphysics will be pretty productive.

[*I should note that in A Thing of This World Lee Braver has an interesting take on these passages that ends up having him attribute a view to Heidegger interestingly homologous to Robert Kraut's "Robust Deflationism." A chapter in a book I'm writing is dedicated to this homology. It's interesting stuff.

I should also note that Bill Blattner's work is relevant to all of this in all sorts of cool ways that I hope to untangle.]

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

In this post I hypothesized about why so many urban fantasy series written by women start out wonderful and end up unreadable, with reference to Jacqueline Carey, Laurel K. Hamilton, Kim Harrison, and Anne Rice. In that post I mistakenly identified Harrison's tick as starting bits of dialogue with "Uh," when in fact it is "Ah." This happened so many times in the penultimate few Hollows novels that I couldn't finish them. But today I gamely made my way through the finale, The Witch With No Name. And I must say that it was much better in the ah department than the previous few. But I still can't understand why HarperCollins cannot do a better editing job for a series that has produced multiple New York Times best sellers. Consider the following sixty-five examples from the book.

"Ah, Ellasbeth?" Landon said, as if not liking the hope in her voice any more than I did (p. 81).

"Ahh. . . . ," Trent hedged, shifting sideways until he could touch the small of my back. Ellasbeth, too, had a minor panic moment--for a completely different reason (p. 84).

"Good." He leaned over the counter and tapped his pencil on the instructions. I knoew the moment he caught my scent when he froze, then pulled back. "The, ah, spell calls for removing the original soul from a healthy body. I skipped that part (p. 92)."

"Ahh, I would think an aspen rod," he said, and I took the pen out of his hand and added it to the list. "Im destroying that before I leave,," he said, meaning the paper (p. 92).

"Ah, it's working," I said as more eyes showed, rising up from the grass like lions (p. 111).

"Right," I said, smile gone, and Cormel nodded for me to get on with it. "Ah, he needs to be prone, " I said, glancing at Felix, the undead vampire glaring malevolently at me, apparently not appreciating hte kindness to stray dogs (p. 133).

Blood, I thought, fear slicing through the drum-borne lethargy. I needed a drop of undead blood. My head snapped up and Jenks darted back, shocked at my worried expression. "Ah, I need a drop of his blood," I said, flicking a look at Felix (p. 139).

"Ah, no."Trent rose, his hands up in protest. "I can't take care of a dog (p. 152)."

"Ah, Rache (p. 164)?"

Trent made an embarrassed sound. Glancing behind me to the cowed vampire, he winced. "Ah, not exactly. I made you Lucy's legal guardian if I died or was missing for more than six months. If we both go, Al gets her. Ellasbeth probably doesn't know about that clause (p. 169)."

Oh God, she was going to do the eulogy. "Ah, Mom (p. 177)?"

"Ah, I need to do some spelling," I said, giving Trent a thankful glance when he gave my fingers a supportive squeeze under the bar (p. 181).

"Just the expensive stuff." My mom's eyes were on Takata as he came back in, this time wearing something a little more subdued but still clearly "retired rock star" with metallic socks and red shoes. "Thank you, dear," she said as she adjusted his wide collar, then turned to me. "Ah, ignore what's under the sink, okay? I've been meaning to take care of it (p. 181)."

"Ah, not all of it," Trent said from the door (p. p. 225).

"Ah, Rache?" Jenks whispered as Trent paled (p. 226).

Trent jerked, clearly surprised, as Jenks hovered backward, mouth curling up in a laugh. "Ah, I would be honored . . . ," Trent said, and Dali chuckled as well, seeming to gather himself to leave. Seeing it, Trent paled even more (p. 231).

"Ah, as much as I'd like . . . ," Trent was saying but it was too late, and Newt pressed her cheek against his as well, her lips smacking to make a kiss sound (p. 231).

A hint of red about his ears, Trent adjusted his collar. "It came with the, ah, circumcision curse. Kind of an all-encompassing trim-and-neat . . . spell (p. 234)."

Cormel cleared his throat, and my focus shifted to him. "Oh, sorry," I said and Trent hid a smile behind a cough. "Ah, no. No, I'm not (p. 235)."

"Ah, Rache?" Trent said feet scuffing as his eyes flicked form me to the FIB guys outside. "The intent is to avoid conflict. Not incite it (p. 236)."

Trent's presence was a whisper beside me. "Ah, Rachel? You're making some rather large policy statements (p. 238)."

Edden'ts feet scuffed on the painted floor. "Ah, yes. About that (p. 242)."

"Ah, Rachel . . ." Edden pulled me to walk beside him, and I winced as Ivy strode out the door, her head high and jaw clenched. "Rachel, you talked to the demons," Edden prompted (p. 243."

"I'm working on it," I said as I hesitated before going out. "You should be okay tonight unless someone gets a wild hair up their, ah, yeah." My voice faltered as Trent breezed past. "It won't get bad until they know if the sun is going to force them back," I finished, voice softer.

She hesitated at her mom's car, the door already open. Nina grimaced form teh other side, and paced forward, head down as I rummaged in my bag. "here," I said, feeling unsure and nervous as I stopped before her. "I, ah, made this for you (p. 244)."

Lump in my throat, I turned. I didn't want him to know I'd seen, and if I stayed, I'd start to cry. "Ah, I'm sorry," I said, looking around as if my purse and coat were out here. "I have to go take a shower. Al, thank you for the information (p. 260)."

"You, ah, think I could come with you?" I said, and Ellasbeth jerked, her attention on Lucy momentarily eclipsed. "I need to persuade them to leave the surface demons in the ever-after and the real demons in reality," I added, wincing. I wasn't going to be the demons' liaison, but someone had to say something, and I did have a reputation for saving large demographics--even if the collateral damage was high (p. 261)."

They were almost lining the streets now, and everyone was being turned away. "Ah, I'm trying to reach someone," I said, thinking if Nina was in there, so was Ivy. "I mean, I was called in to work," I said, flashing my old I.S. badge with my spell-burned hair and dopey look. "Who do I talk to (p. 266)?"

"Long enough." Jenks's wings were shading blue formt eh cold, and he vibrated them for warmth. "She's, ah, rallying the living vampires to protect the undead. Not everyone is happy about it. I don't know what's going to happen if the elves bring their souls back (p. 267).

Jenks's dust was a beacon as he hovered over me, looking for the easiest path to the curb. "Ah, Rache? Is that your mom?"

"Ah, Rache?" Jenks said form my shoulder, too cold to fly well, but I stood there and fumed. Had they forgotten the chaos of when the masters were sleeping just three months ago? Their fear of the night (p. 272)?"

Oh God, he was pointing at me. Sure, I could do some magic and blast everyone, but that'd only get me in jail, if I was lucky. "Ah, Trent. I gotta go," I muttered, then closed the phone in the middle of his outcry (p. 262).

"No, for taking the zip strip off." Trent hesitated, and a cold feeling slipped into me. "Ah, didn't you just snap it?" I hadn't felt anything, but if he'd been quick about it, I wouldn't, seeing as the strip blocked you from all line contact (p. 280).

"Ah, can you make a light?" Trent asked, his voice eerie coming out of the dark (p. 303).

"Ah, Rachel . . ." Trent was wincing, and I stiffened.

"Ah . . . ," the demon said, clearly surprised as well (p. 307).

"Well, ah . . . ," Al stammered (p. 307).

"If we knew that, he wouldn't have to follow." Quen winced as he got his legs stright and tried to get up. "Ahhhhh, that's going to hurt tomorrow (p. 308)."

The demon's face twitched. "It was an accident," he said flatly. "If you get the paperwork that returns Lucy to you, ah, just summon me (p. 318)."

"Ahh," I hedged, not wanting to call it a night quite yet. "Can I use your phone to call my mom before she storms the I.S. (p. 320)?"

Or turn really, really bad. I clicked off the table lamp, wanting the muffling gray of shadow. "I, ah, don't have my phone anymore either," I said, reluctant to hang up but having nothieng more to say. "Just call Trent to get hold of me." Unnoticed until now, the faint glow fo the downstairs bounced against the ceiling to light everything in a soothing haze (p. 323).

Trent laughte, the sound of it seeming to ease some of the ugly uncertainty away. "I'd really lke you to be there, not necessarily as a demon represenatitive, but as, ah . . ." He winced (pp. 326-7).

"Ah, David," I said to distrat the demon. "Al brought up an interesting point; if Landon manages to destroy the undead souls, then int might negatively impact the undead, as their souls and consciousnesses might be forever divided. Is Cormel still buying into Landon's lies, or is he just stringing Landon along hoping I'll come bail him out when it doesn't work (p. 341)?"

Vivian's whistle made me flush. "Ah, that can't be healthy," the woman said, and Jenks went to sit on David's shoulder and fill him in (p. 342).

"So what do we do?" I said, keeping a tight watch on Ivy. "We can't allow an end to the ever-after, even to prevent the undead souls from killing their, ah, own. I can't live in a world with no magic (p. 344)."

David started from his thoughts. "Ah, I'm not really a representative. I was there because they couldn't find anyone else on short notice (p. 347)."

"I'm staying downtown at the Cincinnatian," Vivian said, tucking her notes away in a tiny purse that had to be bigger on the inside than the out. "Give me until noon." She hesitated as she stood. "Ah, make that three. They migh tnot be up yet. I'll have a better idea of what the coven will do (p. 349)."

"Ah, just the local distribution of the packs to minimize disruption to services," Trent lied, and Ivy sent Jenks to get a croissant. We might be here awhile. "The same thing the packs did the last time the vampires panicked (p. 349)."

"The thing about a collective curse is that it can be broken if the prson orchestrating it is, ah . . ." Trent's voice trailed off as he searched for a word (p. 350)."

"You haven't for a long time," he said, hands clasped between his knees, making him look worried and scared. "We, ah, hate to admit it, but demons are still tied to elven magic (p. 359)."

My hope flooded back, and I came to him, sitting so our knees almost touched, begging him to listen. "Al, I know wwe can do this. You ma be only four hundred, but you have the gargoyles as anchors now. There's support among the elves, hidden in the dewar. Vivian is trying to sway the witches' coven. Professor Anders . . ." I hesitated. "Ah, she's okay, right (p. 359)?"

"Ah, Landon is probably in the adjoining room," Jenks suggested, but his soulful, almost pitying expression told me he was just saying that to try to give Trent something to pin his worry to. We could not start a firefight in a room where Lucy was (p. 366).

Chasing down Landon." Edden almost swaggered, so pleased was he. "He's the one who called us in. We got here before the I.S. Ah, if it's any consolation, Cormel agrees that the elves were trtying to kill the undead (p. 390)."

Jenks sifted a thin, frustrated dust and Trent fidgeted, his expression wary as we watched three more Weres run down the street. "Ah . . . I'll be right back," he said when Jenks began making a weird whine, Trent jiggling on his feet before lurching into motion and striding to Edden. The floor was clearing out--and it made me even more nervous than the crowded one (p. 392).

Ellasbeth looked at me, her words hesitant as she took in the bandages and blood. Not all of it was mine. Most of it wasnt' mine, atually, and that somehow made it worse. "Ah, no one believes," she said. "But you need to do something, Trent. He's blaming you, too (p. 403)."

"Boys and girls," Newt soothed, her pleasant expression faltering when she noticed a bruise in the shape of a handprint on her arm. "We, ah, have all suffered, and though we clearly cannot forget, can we at least strive to forgive each other such that we can . . . survive (p. 408)?"

"Ah, Newt?" I hazarded, but Dali had stood, his face red and frustrated as the already insecure demon came to grips with the fact that he was helpless before a world that wanted to see him dead (p. 409).

"It's Nina's soul, free of her consciousness," Al said. "Unlike that ill-fated attempt when you, ah, tried to bind with that soul, Ivy likely won't notice a thing. But there will be far-reaching repercussions from this (p. 428)."

Along the lines of (1) in BP Morton's first comment, it's important to point out that Pandora (supposedly) draws on the Music Genome Project to characterize similar songs. Tone Loc, Sir Mixalot, and Sublime may not have influenced Beastie Boys, nor be liked by those who like the Beastie boys, but they may share some "musicological DNA" with the Beastie Boys. (And sampling the first Tone Loc song that came up on YouTube, I can see how that overlap might work, w/ early Beastie Boys, at least.)

ReCAPTCHA software tries to prevent bots from posting on blogs by having users retype text that is distorted enough to not (at least not yet) be recognizable by machines used by spammers. Brown tried again and again and the thing wouldn't accept what he typed.

From googling, I gather that other people have this problem. Posts like this shows how to turn of the reCAPTCHA algorithm in typepad. Basically you click Settings, the click Comments, and then un-tick Require Verification Code (there are pictures on the post to which I linked). One weird thing is that I never ticked that box in the first place, but I've unticked it now.

Monday, February 09, 2015

Somewhere Graham Harman wrote that your biggest enemy is the blank page. Just tell yourself that your first draft is going to suck and that you'll have plenty of time to rewrite. I find this pretty helpful advice.

Emily doesn't mention a couple of other things we both do. First, it really helps if writing is ritualized. I always end up writing about the same time of the day in the same place and listening to music. These slowly change as life presents different obstacles and possibilities, but they usually stay the same for months or years. Right now the only way I can write is to wake up at 4:45 AM, ride my bicycle into my office by 6:00 AM, and get a few hours in before students start to show up and make noise. Second, distractions should be minimized. Emily writes in a little side room in our house where the wifi doesn't come in. In addition to writing in my office before the custodial staff even show up, I've found that things go much better if I don't open facebook until I've finished whatever goal I set the night before for my writing.

Finally, Graham Harman also somewhere said that your second biggest enemy is the completed book or article. It's very important the day before to figure out exactly what tiny piece you want to get accomplished the next day (of course there might be some lagniappe, but focus on the tiny piece) and then when you're actually writing don' t worry about anything but that tiny piece.

To recap:

Fight the empty page by (a) typing and see what happens, and (b) telling yourself the first draft will suck, but that doesn't matter because most writing is rewriting,

Fight the spectre of the complete book by figuring out the night before exactly what little bit you are going to tackle the next day.

Admittedly these are not sufficient. You also have to cultivate certain character traits that keep you doing it. If you are writing for publication, you have to be able to get back up over and over again and resubmit things that have often been rejected multiple times. When the acceptance rate is lower than 5%, that means if you are average with respect to other people submitting you will have to submit at least twenty times for each acceptance. The odds of acceptance are vastly worse in fiction. There's a karmic balance though. If it's easier to get academic work published, it's not any easier to get it read. The overwhelming majority of articles and books never get cited by anyone other than the author self-citing her own texts later on. Most of us have to master the art of writing into the void.

If writing into the void drives you nuts, take some consolation in the fact that even the people most cited are in all likelihood writing into the void as well. I'm not talking about the heat death of the universe. Intellectual fashion is fickle. Suzanne Langer and Hans Vaihinger were probably bigger names than anyone writing today, but who is teaching their books. If Nelson Goodman can fall from grace, then anyone can and almost everyone will.

The benefit of writing into the void is that it keeps us honest. There's a bit of a paradox here. The collective system that does or doesn't recognize us only works if enough people remain unmotivated by collective recognition. I'm sure a good Hegelian like Robert Brandom would have interesting things to say about this. . . but I need to get back to work.

Friday, February 06, 2015

Forgot to link to Emily's last week post, which (nested in a discussion of how much characters can change) contains the kind of description of the ontology of fictional works that one finds all over the place when one attends to what actual writers say about their craft

Mark Ohm and I develop our theory of fictions as thought experiments in part because of our reading of how writers of fiction describe their craft (downloadable here; I should note that Mary Sirridge and Eva Dadlez made similar suggestions, which we take ourselves to be building on, and that we have another partially completed paper which I'll be happy to send anyone who is interested). Our theory hasn't gone over well either with philosophers or narratologists. As far as I can tell, there are four interconnected widely accepted presuppositions which pretty strongly militate against it, the first related to Emily's post.

Anti-intentionalism- The original "intentional fallacy" concerned whether an author's interpretation of her own art-work was in any way authoritative. People who thought that it was not were anti-intentionalists. This was a good professional move for academic critics, who ran a nice shop during the heydey of "theory." But it always smacked a little bit of psychic revenge of failed artists, a kind of revenge made most explicit in so-called "reader-response theory," where the real creative force is not the author, but rather the trained reader, e.g. the literature professor. Again, nobody much believes this any more, but we're all a little bit hungover. If we are no longer the sole decoders of a text's meaning, general questions about the ontology of art-forms and genres are still thought of as best left to the professionals.

Focus on Marginal Cases- Artists are very creative at playing with, and rebelling against, prior conceptions of what their given art-form is supposed to be. They're very good at seeing just how much they can get away with. But then if you think that the purpose of the philosophy of art is to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions that encompass all art (or all of some form or genre), then the weirdest, most out there, experimental stuff ends up seeming central, precisely because that stuff is often designed as counterexamples by the artists in question. The fact that the necessary and sufficient conditions game is ultimately a mug's game doesn't change the centrality of marginal cases, in part because familiarity with such cases is a kind of badge of hipness and not liking them of philistinism. Because of this, any theory of fiction that takes seriously what Steven King says about his writing process is going to be dismissed because it doesn't capture, for example, Gilbert Sorrentino's late novels, or Kathy Acker, or William S. Burroughs, or Finnegan's Wake, etc. etc. etc. However, the escape from the mug's game is to realize that the task of the ontologist of art should be to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the subclass of art-works that are genetically necessary for all of the art-works in the genre in question. Experimental fiction is parasitic on the kind of thing Steven King does. To really explain it, you have to first have a theory of what Steven King is up to. But people who think you have to define the whole genre at one go are constitutively unable to do this.

Marginalization of Normative Questions- This is probably more widespread among narratologists and metaphysicians who write about fictionalism than in analytic philosophy of art, though it's there too. Noel Carroll likes to contrast classificatory theories of art with commendatory ones, arguing that the former is primary and that the latter is a part (and not the major one) of criticism. But artists do not make this division in their own thinking about art. They are proper Wittgensteinians who recognize that questions about classification in art can only be answered by first attending to the features of prototypical examples, and that this is necessary in part because there is indeterminacy between something being a bad example of something and not being an example of something. Epistemically, can't know what a genre novel is unless you have some kind of idea of what makes a good genre novel a good genre novel. And an answer to the metaphysical status of the being a genre novel will also be dependent upon the properties manifest in the good ones.

Marginalization of Actual Truth of Artworks- In continental circles the very idea that there is an observer independent truth is often taken to be jejeune. In analytic circles "fictionalism" names positions that take the truth predicate in a given discourse to be radically defective. Both positions are a radical departure from traditional aesthetics, which concerned itself with how actual truths are contained in fictional texts. Both positions thus infect our thinking about fictionality. If, on the other hand, fictionality just is the kind of counterfactuality relevant to thought experiments, the traditional view is restored. I don't know what this ends up doing to the fictionalist project.

As far as I can tell, the above four properties are so widespread anywhere that narrative is academically studied. I wish that I had more time to work on the philosophy of art, but they do strike me as worthy adversaries and I hope that I have time to engage more seriously with them some day.

Thursday, February 05, 2015

If there were a yearly contest for best example of that species of academic passive-aggression involving this-hurts-me-more-than-you diffidence just as one attempts to twist the knife deeper, then surely Peter Gratton would take the first, second, and third prizes for I don't know how many years in a row. I remain in awe of his powerful jujitsu.

Luckily, one need not read his blog or go to his SPEP talks to witness the trope in all of its glory. Consider the conclusion of his new NDPR review of Gert-Jan van der Heiden's Ontology after Onto-theology: Plurality, Event, and Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy.

Pace van der Heiden, though in admiration for what is an important book, I think the contingency of thought and being, as he lays it out, requires thinking from out of our temporalization and emplacement, from which an epochē is only ever a denial of the conditions of possibility for thought in the first place, along with the processes of patriarchy, racialization, economization and so on, that are its conditions, too, and cannot be suspended so easily as one is said to do with the past in these pages. Such an epochē, then, risks becoming an alibi for a type of philosophizing we have seen too much these past years, pretending a neutrality while not negotiating with traditions that it nevertheless repeats in often insidious ways.

You sam, even though van der Heiden and by implication Arendt, Badiou, Nancy, Derrida, Meillassoux, etc. are writing books that Peter Gratton deems "important" (and this is why it's so doggone sad that they don't measure up in the end) they nonetheless comprehensively misunderstand that which they assay through failure to really think out "the conditions of possibility of thought." So it is with a heavy heart that we must together realize that a result of this failure metaphysicians and high church phenomenologists alike "insidiously repeat" a set of genuine evils ("patriarchy, racialization, economization and so on") that would be substantively improved if only every last scrap of academic philosophy contributed to the already sizeable pile of journal articles, books, and blog posts criticizing such evils.

Whew! That was a hard thing for us to admit. But we can move forward with relief and resolve now.

Seriously, given the Eddie Haskell* nature of Gratton's more-in-sorrow-than-anger schtick the above is likely to be wrongly parsed by analytic philosophers unaware of the nature of this dispute among continental philosophers. The following kind of sensible and important meta-philosophical point is not what is at issue: epistemology should contain as a proper part of it research the way that heuristic biases lead to sexism and racism, ethics and political philosophy must contain concrete investigations into how oppression is legitimated and decreased, the metaphysics of value is a part of metaphysics, etc. etc. etc.

Rather, what's going on is the devolution of the tradition known as the "hermeneutics of suspicion" (Nietzsche, Marx, Freud) into an all-purpose club by which 95% of philosophy in the Eastern and Western traditions can be dismissed. To see how this works, pretend that you are Texas A&M's Robert Garcia,** minding your own business while trying to tease out whether a trope theoretic account of universals affects the debate between bundle theorists and substance-attribute theorists. You may be interested in all sorts of political issues, and indeed may even philosophize about them sometimes, but your current project with respect to tropes just doesn't have very much to do with politics. One can imagine Gratton lauding Elizabeth Barnes for her work in feminism while getting into Bill Clinton squinty eye territory while sadly dismissing all of her metaphysical work as politically retrograde.

According to a universal hermeneutics of suspicion, pursuing something independently of its political implications (or rather basis) is the height of politically retrograde bad faith. At best you are actually just working as an alibi for sexism, racisim, economism and whatnot, because the very idea that one can bracket the political in philosophy is itself a political act legitimating the suppression of political speech by the oppressed. At worst, we can do a deep reading of your work to show how, for example, your metaphysical "individuals" are implicated in neo-liberal individualism that justifies colonialism as well as all of the depredations of late capitalism. Instead of working on trope theory you must now proceed to the reprocessing center where you learn that philosophers have thusfar only interpreted the world, whereas the point is to write books about changing it.

According to the traditional hermeneutics of suspicion, a given discourse is undermined by providing an explanation of why people engage in that discourse, an explanation that doesn't rely on the truth of substantive claims made by the discourse's participants. Take Nietzsche. According to (a comic book version of) him, people make moral claims because they are too weak to do anything about the things that irritate them. When the weak person takes something as wrong, she is really just enlisting the universe to get a kind of psychic revenge against those complicit in the weak person's weakness. Now if this really were to explains all moral discourse, there is very little reason to take moral discourse at all seriously. The explanation of "what's really going on" when people engage in the discursive practice ends up undermining that very practice. Marx's critique of ideology worked very similarly, as did Freud's explanations of most of our psychic life.

We see an universalization of the hermeneutic strategy in people like Gratton and Galloway, the application of the Nietzsche/Marx/Freud inference to any pretenses of objectivity. Any discourse other than slacktivist-ready political posturing is a form of Marxist ideology. I think I'm philosophizing about tropes, but what I'm really doing is perpetuating oppression, either because the conceit that there can be non-slacktivist discourse is itself a tool of oppression, or because various linguistic/conceptual tropes I employ cannot be separated from tropes used by oppressors. But the former criticism is a non-sequitur, and the latter is merely a not that much more sophisticated version of the "You know who else was a vegetarian? Hitler!" undergraduate argument. Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud are turning in their graves.

I forget where Wittgenstein pens some remarks on Freud, but it goes something like this. He'd told a Freudian about a very vivid dream involving some rose bushes and oak trees with these fantastic long branches (of the sort we have on the LSU campus), and the Freudian said, "Aha! You were' really dreaming about vaginas and penises!" Wittgenstein was too polite to ask the Freudian what he was really dreaming about when he dreamed about vaginas and penises. Rose bushes and trees?

If everything is political, then nothing is.

When the ethical egoist tells you that you are really doing what you really desire when you think you are doing something noble, the proper answer is "So what?" If there is a useful psychological notion of "desire" such that my deeper desires involve overcoming desires to help myself at the expense of others, then that's irrelevant to the morally relevant notion of "desire." When a skilled hermeneut of suspicion tells you that every speech act is really political, the same bait and switch is happening. Just as one can deny one's desires in the morally relevant sense, one can engage in non-political discourse in the sense actually relevant to emancipatory politics.

What is the point of politics? To produce a polity where all that exists is political slacktivism? No. That's entirely self-defeating. As William S. Burroughs used to say in a different context, a truly emancipatory politics seeks to make itself unnecessary. Is this place beyond politics merely utopian? Or are there numinous places in the here and now that give us an intimation of a place beyond politics. At least as far as I parse him, Adorno thought that art had to be such a place. For anyone properly sympathetic to Hegel metaphysics (broadly construed to include David Lewis as well as what the late Heidegger and Derrida were up to is to) is also such a place. We can envision a utopian ideal when matter becomes spirit, genuinely self-aware, even though we are nowhere near there (in part due to oppression). As we develop our understanding of matter, we participate in this process and for brief times inhabit these numinous places. These places are a far, far distance from the vulgar utilitarianism that the hermeneutics of suspicion have devolved into.

Finally, it should be clear that such vulgar utilitarianism is itself bad politics. Yes one must break eggs to make omelets, but that doesn't justify a system where everybody is just breaking eggs all the time and never enjoying the omelets.

[*"You hair looks wonderful today, Mrs. Cleaver. My Mother says you must spend every day in the beauty shop."

**Who gave a fantastic paper at the Southwest Conference in New Orleans a few years ago.

***As Bryant notes, "Walnuts resemble testicles. Therefore walnuts are phallocentric" simply isn't a very good argument. Harman makes a similar claim in this brief post about Galloway's actual argument that Badiou is politically harmful because he talks about mathematics, which is used by capitalists you sam. The fact that Harman and Bryant should have to even explicitly say these things shows one just how badly the hermeneutics of suspicion fell in the intervening century.]

Wednesday, February 04, 2015

Analytic philosophers often find English language continental philosophy most risible precisely when English language continental philosophers mistranslate the French definite article. For example, while French syntax allows the word "événement" to be preceded by an indefinite article ("un événement") or the definite article ("l'événement"), "the event" grossly mistranslates the latter. In English (at least outside of continental philosophy circles) "the event" always refers to some unique event. If someone talks about the event in English, it is always felicitous to ask them which event they mean to pick out. This is not the case inFrench, where the definite article can pick out the concept/meaning/property corresponding to the compound nominal to which it attaches.

I don't know where this business of widespread mistranslation the French definite article started, but is arguably reached its apex with discussion of "the other" with respect to Sartre and Levinas' important discussions. Bad translation reifies "otherness" into some hypostatic divinity, "The Other," about which it is much easier to be pretentious (although, listen to the song at right).

I'm not enough of an expert to know if the same thing has happened with respect to the late period Heidegger term "ereignis," which is now often referred to as "the event of becoming." This is such a strange rendering of the German (Paly and Emal give "enowning," and Dreyfus "things coming into themselves by belonging together") , that I suspect that this is only been possible via a weird detour through a good translation of the German into French, and then picking up the American continental philosophy norms for translating the French determinate article. But perhaps the danger is more stark here than with "the other." The event of becoming sounds so much like some primal act of creation by Being that talking this way makes it almost impossible not to lapse into what proper Heideggerians refer to as "onto-theology."*

Nonetheless, the advantage of talking this way with respect to late Heidegger is that it suggests a connection between Badiou's discussion of the property of being an event and Heidegger's discussion of enowning. In the next post I will try to explain what I take this connection to be. Briefly, I think that late Heidegger's notion can be seen as a kind of parabolic limit of Badiou's. This not only shows that there should be much more crossover between American (and French) Heideggerians and Badiouians, I think that seeing this will make it much clearer to analytic philosophers why both philosophers' work is interesting and worth taking seriously. For these reasons, in the sequel I'll henceforth use the barbaric non-American Americanism "the event."

[*Pace Simon Blackburn: (1) onto-theology is not a difficult concept, and (2) Heidegger's critique of it should be part of every philosopher's tool-kit.]

Tuesday, February 03, 2015

Pandora is a pretty fun streaming musical service. You can seed stations with bands you like and then when you play a station the algorithm plays some songs by those bands but also songs by other bands that it thinks you will like. When this works well, you discover new bands. You can also nudge the algorithm by clicking thumbs up or thumbs down on given songs. In my experience, the best mix of songs requires hitting the shuffle button so that songs randomly show up from different stations.

As a veteran of I don't know how many turn-based strategy games (most recently Civilization V) part of the fun of these things is always trying to figure out exactly how the algorithm works. I think I've figured out what's going on with Pandora, albeit there were some weird facts in need of explanation:

Pandora amply verifies Nick Cave's infamous claim, “I’m forever near a stereo saying, ‘What the #&%$ is this garbage?’ And the answer is always the Red Hot Chili Peppers.” Three of my favorite channels are 80's Punk (Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, etc.), Depressing Music (the Drones, Fiona Apple, Velvet Underground, etc.), and Classic Rock (obvious). For the first month or so on all three of these channels I was forever having to give a Red Hot Chili Peppers song a thumbs down.* Why Pandora? Why?

When you are not in shuffle mode, Pandora will sometimes get stuck in a subgenre that you don' t like. After I added Motorhead and the Misfits to my 80s Punk channel, I would spend some afternoons watching it slowly descend into song after after song of overwrought numetal.

I wanted to see what would happen if I seeded a channel with just the Beastie Boys. It wasn't pretty, what I got was Ton Loc, Sir Mixalot, and Sublime, not all of the cool bands that the Beastie Boys loved, took as influences, and often sampled**

When I started experimenting with Pandora I just assumed it was a dumb statistical algorithm of the Amazon sort, recommending songs that are liked by people who also like songs by the bands you've seeded the station with. Given the above, I thought that this couldn't be possible. How many Beastie Boys fans love Ton Loc, Sir Mixalot, and Sublime so much. How many fans of Black Flag like the Red Hot Chili Peppers. So I assumed they must be doing it the old school way, where every song is pretagged according to some category, and the algorithm negotiates a search tree based on that. But then I realized I'd made a mistake. What's going on is that a lot more Pandora users like the Red Hot Chili Peppers than like any of the bands I like. A lot more people like Sir Mixalot than the Sugar Hill Gang. Some percentage of those Sir Mixalot fans also like some songs by the Beastie Boys. But if very few people are seeding stations with the Sugar Hill gang, they won't be represented well on a Beastie Boys channel. Given this an Amazon type algorithm might very well end up pushing the Chili Peppers on Gen Ex music lovers who have no time for them.

An easy solution would be for the algorithm to more heavily weigh the likes and dislikes of people who have seeded stations with the same bands that you've seeded your stations with. It would be interesting to see if such an algorithm, when set lose on a Beastie Boys seeded station, would produce a radio station that the late MCA would have wanted to listen to.

As far as the cycling towards numetal thing I think it was a combination of just how many people like those wretched bands and me imparting a pattern where there was none. I mean, if an infinite number of monkeys were typing for an infinite number of years, one of them would pen all of the terrible music of Korn, Linkin Park, Godsmack, and Limp Biscuit for that matter. Right? I don't know.

[*Some dear friends of mine love the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but they are all post-grunge. For grungies, The Red Hot Chili Peppers were our version of Limp Biscuit, something for people who ostensibly rejected jock culture but nonetheless embodied all of its worst aspects (and none of the good ones). We can't forgive them for the sad realization that being "alternative" was consistent with being a sexist meat-head. This is the point that gen exers en masse gave up on the possibility of radical politics. I'd rather listen to the Steve Miller Band anyhow. I take it the band represents something else for millenials.

**This is possibly the coolest web page in the universe. You can click on any song from Paul's Boutique and get a list of all of the songs sampled by that song. See the canonical article by slate dot com's Matthew Iglesias on how bad copyright law killed a whole genre of music.]